Survivor HUD Update For Solo Queue?
TL;DR: Could we pretty pleeease show the survivors each others' perks in lobby and in game, update the HUD to show terror radius and status effects, and maybe get a message or emote wheel so solo players can communicate their intentions to their teamamtes? Just pre-scripted messages like "I'm coming to help" or "Killer near me" or "Be careful of traps"?
Hey there,
I think most people would agree that solo queue survivor is the role that struggles most in the game… The HUD update we got a while back REALLY helped, but now that it's been some time I'm hoping we can revisit it and add a few more things to help even the playing field between Solo and SWF, otherwise certain killers will be tuned for solo and get stomped by SWF (Like Ghost Face), while other killers get tuned for SWF and solo queue has an incredibly difficult time coordinating (like Pinhead or basically any insidious camper, although camping is blessedly less frequent with the new changes it's still there).
- Can we please see each others' perks in the lobby and in game? Maybe in the escape menu during the match? This information is pivotal to making good decisions in game: If someone has deliverance, every SWF on comms would be able to say "I have deliverance, don't worry about me" but in solo queue it's almost a wasted perk because the whole benefit - saving time by not needing to go for the unhook - is wasted without communication.
- Can we please see status effects on the HUD? The most important ones I think are blindness, exposed, oblivious. and exhausted. Blindness in particular is very frustrating because if someone is blind they can't really go for hook saves or picking up downed people, but the rest of the team doesn't know that… So they may be doing gens or looking for a medkit or hex totem, expecting someone else to go for the save, but that person just can't.
- Speaking of blindness, the design of this status effect heralds back to a time when most people were playing solo. A LOT (though not all) of the information this status effect 'takes away' are things that can be negated or mitigated with simple comms - and I'm not talking competitive comms, just like… "I'm on the ground by shack" and such. As a result, this really hurts solo queue (who already struggle way more than SWF) while barely impacting SWF's at all. I'll put it this way: If a killer came out whose power innately gave a long-duration blind, they would probably feel useless vs SWF and oppressive vs solo queue. Maybe blindness could remove the ability to see the killer's red stain and aura? Or maybe downed/hooked survivors could still have their auras seen through blindness as a special exception? In the ladder case, though, we'd be taking a status effect that's already pretty weak vs SWF and making it almost useless…
- Can we please see an indicator of which survivors are inside the killer's terror radius on the HUD? I don't want to flood the HUD with extra info, but this could take advantage of the existing chase indicator - maybe the chase indicator could be changed so that it now pops up whenever a survivor is in terror radius, and changes to red whenever a survivor's in chase? Again, this is info that even the noobiest SWF teams will communicate, but solo queue really suffers for not having.
- This one is a huge request, and I know certain implementations of it are a terrible idea, but I really think survivors need a sort of 'message wheel' that they can pick a message from and it'll show up briefly on the hud. Messages may be words, but they could just as easily be symbols provided the symbols are labeled within the wheel itself - people will catch on. Messages could include:
- I'll go for the save
- I'll do a generator
- I'm in trouble
- Killer near me
- Traps by me
- Killer is sneaking
- I'm coming to help
- I'll distract the killer
And so on
I have a lot more ideas, but they seems significantly harder to implement and perhaps more contentious than these, and honestly I think if these changes were made it could really close the gap between solo queue and SWF, which would free up the design space for new killer powers requiring coordination. Already killers like Pinhead are incredibly frustrating to go against in solo queue: sometimes nobody goes for the box (maybe they don't know what it is, or maybe they assume someone else will, or maybe the killer is nearby and we just don't know because they're not in chase), other times EVERYONE goes for the box and pinhead gets an immense amount of free pressure just because solo queue don't have enough info about what each other are doing or what they're capable of. It's not that he's too strong necessarily - I /love/ killers with interactive powers and 'side quests' - it's that he's very /frustrating/ because of the lack of coordination in solo queue.
Final thought: Some killers really need buffed, and this would hurt them. Killers like Trapper, Ghost Face, Sadako, etc. But I think even the people who main those killers would agree that solo queue has it harder in most cases (I'm a ghostie main, almost got him to P100), but I think it would be best to bring solo queue closer to SWF and then buff killers appropriately with the new "solo queue buffs" in mind. I say 'solo queue buffs' in quotes because from the perspective of someone who only plays solo queue when I play survivor, it really /feels/ more like solo queue is currently massively nerfed… I don't mean to criticize anyone, but things like not being able to see other survivors' perks in lobby just seem like things that should be there but aren't specifically to make solo queue harder. I know that's not the case, but it just feels that way sometimes, and I'm sure other people share my frustration.
If, by some miracle, this gets read: Thanks for reading! Sorry it's a novel - that's kind of my MO, I can't stop typing. XD
Comments
-
You cannot show perks in the lobby. People will dodge whatever they don't like.
You'd be nerfing every one of those status effects tacitly.
Or, in the case of blindness, explicitly. You can see hook bubbles when people are hooked and the activity HUD and the increased unhook timers make it so it is very rare to get left on hook for a long time.
So blindness. There's precisely one perk that gives indefinite blindness: third seal. Third seal is a hex that takes a long time to get going unless it explodes in the first twenty seconds of the match, which is likely. It's not worth crippling an Already weak effect for the edge case of a killer having it on and nobody being able to figure it how hook bubbles on. Or slugging an entire team which isn't really viable anymore with knockout gone.
Then you're talking about giving survivors a lot of information for free. People seem to think swf are conveying constant, infallible information about what they are doing at all times and what the killer is doing at all times. They're not. They make mistakes like anyone else. You're giving them an assload of information free from human error which buffs them. Also and this is blasphemy, people hate hearing it: good solo teams exist. They can leverage the in game communication to achieve coordination. This same information buffs them as well. I do not think survivors need across the board buffs.
A chat wheel would kill the immersion of the game for me. Another unpopular opinion but I like the aesthetic and feel of the game. At the very least it'd need a hefty cooldown so people aren't pinging save me over and over again while the killer is right next to them.
"Complicated" killers. Pinhead is not complicated. You go hold m1 on the glowing rectangle when he's in chase with someone else. That's it. That's the secret. Sadako is not complicated. Go hold m1 on the glowing rectangles. Return tapes when condemned gets high. The tools you're talking about will not enable folks who are confused and frightened by the concept of interacting with a glowing rectangle to suddenly be competent. You could give them mapwide bond and they'd still play suboptimally.
I play exclusively solo and my escape rate is 42% which is apparently around that the devs want. The screeching and whining about how solo is a nightmare of getting rolled around on glass shards is one of the dumbest, most overblown things I've ever seen in a community. It ain't that bad. It's exactly the same issues as every other game that saddles you with a random team. People do stuff that makes sense to them, not to you.
1 -
Seeing teammates perks is coming later on, not in lobby tho (in a match) then they will collect data and see maybe they will implement them in lobby but I hope they at least implement perks in HUD so you won't need to constantly press esc to see the perks.
The other thing is "Anti-Camping" in their roadmap, I think all they gonna do is add anti-camp meter on HUD and that's it, I may be wrong here but I guess it's gonna be it, they talked about it before.0 -
Wow, I didn't expect such a negative reaction to something I've kinda felt was common sense, and also seems to have been recommended by some of DbD's biggest streamers including those who main killer…
I guess I'll take these in order:
- You can't show perks in lobby, people will dodge what they don't like
- I think this risk is massively overblown for the benefit it could provide. We're in a game space where survivors DC in the first 60 seconds of a game because a teammate does a totem or chest instead of hopping on gens or if a teammate had No Mither. Maybe if they could see that said person had inner strength or hardened they wouldn't be so eager to dip - and if seeing that a person had no mither in the lobby would make people dodge, that's better than getting all the way into a match to have them DC. I see no reason not to at least TRY showing perks in lobbies and see if it truly has the horrible effect you're claiming it would or if it actually improves people DCing during matches.
- Blindness/The Third Seal
- Uhh… So Ultimate Weapon, Mindbreaker, and Septic Touch don't exist? Not to mention that MOST killers have a blindness add-on… And I mean, Knock Out /does/ still give blindness (to the person who got knocked down), and claiming that the status effect it gives other teammates is totally distinct from blindness because it has a 16-meter grace range seems disingenuous.
- The truth as I see it is that very few people use blindness PRECISELY BECAUSE most survivors groups are SWF. That's not to say they're all 4-mans, it's not to say they're all OP, it's not to say they're too strong - it's just to say that in the case of blindness, nobody uses it because it, specifically, is useless against most teams. Even if they're not comp - calling out "I'm blind" or "I'm by shack" is NOT competitive. It's 12 year olds playing together with 30 hours in the game stuff. I NEVER said that we should balance the game around people in 4-man sweat lodges.
- Nevertheless - I only play solo queue and killer, and my main killer is Ghost Face and I'm getting close to P100ing him and Dredge: I /know/ that plenty of killers struggle, especially against SWF's. Here's the thing though: I'm of the firm opinion that the reason that most of the killers I like can't be buffed is BECAUSE they're already so oppressive vs teams without information. I want to try and get every survivor team to have access to ROUGHLY the same information because otherwise certain powers, effects, perks, etc (much like blindness) will be too oppressive to be buffed and simultaneously too weak for most people to use.
- Information for free
- Look, being able to see your teammates perks, status effects, whether they're in terror radius, and whether they intend to go for the save or stay working on gens is NOT too much information. It's information that ANY SWF - again, not a competitive group, just a small group of friends who play the game for fun and suck at looping - will have access to. As long as the gap between SWF info and Solo Queue info is so wide, certain killers, powers, add-ons, and perks won't be able to receive the buffs and changes they need to be effective enough against a potential SWF group to be useful. Again, look at blindness: So many add-ons to use, NONE get picked. Blindness is pretty strong - I recommend when you see a lobby in which survivors slowly trickle in so you can be reasonably certain you have at least a couple solo queuers, run a shaman build and throw in the third seal instead of devour hope. Then try again when you think you have a 3-man and solo or 2 groups of 2. I bet even though it's very unlikely that those groups are super professionals you'll see a big difference in how much of a disruption blindness causes.
- DbD was originally created with the ability to play with friends explicitly EXCLUDED from its design. As in during the intiial days they said they would not implement a 'SWF'-type feature because it would break the balance of the game. Everyone agreed. Then they added it anyways because it helps the game have longevity and we can all agree that's a good thing: The game needed to permit SWF if it wanted to stay relevant. All I'm asking is that we now acknowledge that we're in a game where SWF is more frequent than having 4 solo queuers, and we try to level the playing field between solo queue and SWF so that we can balance the game for all groups.
- A final thought here: Information isn't going to make you better at chase, and chase is the main bit of skill expression as survivor in DbD. Giving survivors more information isn't going to stop the Sable from running straight ahead without looking backwards, getting cut off, and going down in 30 seconds. What information WILL do is help to ensure that if the rest of the team does poorly, it's not because they all went for the save because nobody knew if someone else was closer, or because they expected David to go for the save because they couldn't tell that even though he wasn't technically in chase he was still avoiding the killer within terror radius, etc. They'll be able to make effective decisions. It doesn't mean they WILL make effective decisions, but it at least gives more opportunity for skill expression and coordination. I want killer buffs - I especially want ghost face and dredge buffs - but that doesn't mean "anything that hinders survivors from doing well is good for killers". If you, like me, play weaker M1 killers then you should want solo queue and SWF to be made as close to equal as possible so that the devs don't see "Oh well your kill rate is high enough so we don't need to buff you" when really it's that you almost always kill solo queuers and almost always lose to any SWF (which is an exaggeration trying to make a point - killers should be good or bad against both SQ and SWF as equally as possible so that they can be buffed or nerfed accordingly).
- Chat Wheel Vs Immersion
- Really? Even if it were just symbols that popped up next to someone's portrait just like the current symbols for generator/totem/chest/etc? It would ruin your immersion more than the Castlevanie theme playing aginst Dracula, Billy's ridiculous 'BLARGH', the fact that the xenomorph is literally chasing you around a trash can and can't catch up, the fact that pyramid head is stunned because a block of wood was thrown on his head or was blinded through his helmet by a flashlight, chucky's constant foul-mouthed trash talk, teabagging and flashlight-blinding killers to make them look ridiculous, and a million other immersion-breaking features? I'm sorry, even if this really would be the straw that breaks the camel's back for your immersion in particular, I genuinely think it's for the benefit of the game's overall health, balance, and longevity.
- Complicated Killers
- On the one hand I agree - I certainly don't find Pinhead complicated. But I also have several thousand hours in the game, I play a lot of survivor as well as every killer (except ghoul), I watch streamers play and give commentary, I watch youtube guides on fun/meta builds, I read reddit threads, I try out PTB's, I know what every perk in the game does, if the devs released something that was complicated for players like myself (and presumably yourself as well), it would totally alienate newer players. That doesn't change the fact that Cenobite has never dropped below a 53% kill rate, and if you do play mostly solo queue (just like I do) then you MUST have noticed that solo queue groups struggle mightily in figuring out when/who should go for the box. That DOES NOT MEAN every solo queue group struggles against pinhead - there's more to him than just going for the box - it means that solo queue groups are going to have more instances where multiple people unnecessarily go for the box and stop working on gens or going for the unhook, AND they have more times when due to poor communication nobody goes for the box until it's too late. This isn't because solo queue teammates are bad - it's just obviously going to happen when you can't communicate. Level the playing field so that we can tell if Pinhead is winning because he's in a good spot or if he's winning because solo queue players can't coordinate.
I also exclusively play solo queue as survivor, and I'm sorry to say but if you truly disagree with every point I've made then I firmly believe that either 1) You're misunderstanding what I want here or 2) You're lying.
If it's the former, let me be super clear: I don't want these buffs to happen so that survivor generally gets stronger. Survivor is already quite strong and I hope killers, especially my dear Ghost Face and Dredge - get changes and buffs to compensate. I want these changes because as long as solo queue has limited access to information then certain types of killer powers, mechanics, status effects, and perks cannot be buffed because they're already too strong against teams with limited information, but also won't be used because they're too weak vs the average group.
I will once again bring up blindness:
We both agree that it's weak, hence why nobody picks it. I hope we both agree that it can't really be buffed - IE, you can't make it stop survivors from seeing the bubble when another survivor is hooked - STRICTLY BECAUSE then it would be too strong against teams that can't communicate through blindness. IF we lived in a hypothetical world where all survivors had voice chat, then even nooby survivors would easily counterplay blindness, and would do so automatically because it's just very natural to ask "Hey, can you pick me up" and then to respond "I can't see you" "Oh, I'm behind you near shack" and so on. So it's too weak for most killers to run against msot groups, but too strong to be buffed against other groups. THAT'S the thing I'm trying to avoid.
SWF simply /is/ stronger than solo queue. It's not a subjective opinion, and it's not always by a tremendous amount, but one side has the opportunity to provide information to their team and the other side does not. Until that gap is lessened, some things are going to be super weak against SWF and super strong against Solo Queuers, and because most people play SWF, those things are always going to have a high chance of being very unsatisfying to play with or against.
-1 - You can't show perks in lobby, people will dodge what they don't like
-
I said indefinite blindness. All those other perks have a duration. Also septic touch and ultimate weapon may as well not exist. I refuse to believe you've seen them once this year. Mindbreaker lasts five seconds, for Christ's sake. And knockout doesn't do that anymore. You are operating on outdated information.
People don't use blindness because it's worthless against everything but WoO. Why would I run a blindness addon when vigil is meta and there are ten better add-ons? It's nonsense. Has nothing to do with the swf boogyman.
You're saying swf are relaying this information constantly, infallibly. They are not. They make mistakes like anybody else and giving them that information while taking out the human element is an objective buff. Which they do not need.
Saying information doesn't make you better in chase is absurd. Why do you think Windows is Opportunity is one of the most used perks in the game? Taking out the guesswork of where to lead the killer is a huge boon to chase. Ridiculous.
53% killrate isn't good. That's underperforming. In the vast majority of my games survivors do the box when I am in chase, carrying or hooking someone. Are they solo? I have no idea. I can only assume that they are because otherwise I'm playing vs a hell of a lot of swfs.
When you say "blindness" again you just mean hex: third seal. You have to. It doesn't make sense otherwise. Every other perk and addon has a duration much shorter than a bleedout or hook stage assuming people can't remember where a bubble is. Pretty much the only utility for blindness is disabling Windows. You aren't using it for slugging or hiding hooks because it's not viable for that.
I'm not really buying the swf is so much better than solo line. The stats don't bear that out. 4 man squads only have a marginally better escape rate than solos. So from my perspective you're just buffing survivors.
1
